


Vessels

by mysterioustranger



Series: A Poisonous Stream [2]
Category: The Da Vinci Code - All Media Types
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, Light Sadism, M/M, Whipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 16:18:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10767903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysterioustranger/pseuds/mysterioustranger
Summary: An angel's sacrifice... from the point of view of a stone-cold pragmatic. A look at Aringarosa's thoughts after Silas' death.





	Vessels

**Author's Note:**

> Sister piece to "Scars".
> 
> This one is... less subtle. 
> 
> Consider yourselves warned for general creepiness ye who enter here.

 

_What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly_

_\- Richard Bach_

 

It was difficult to try and think about Silas when finding oneself so far away from the silent, sacred places where he had always found his solace. Greed, trouble, and exhausting conspiracies – these matters had plagued Cardinal Aringarosa's mind long before their first meeting, and yet to his very last breath, Silas had harboured the power to make them relative.

Not consciously, mind you – it was all in the tendency he had to crouch down in spots hidden to the normal human's eye, savouring a beauty nobody else saw. Special was the only parcel in a garden where no plant grew; special was a particular corner on a shabby roof. No one, including you, my dear reader, will ever know exactly _why_ , for that is apparently a knowledge reserved to beings not of this world, seraphins and angels and all the other myths – but they were.

The wounded Cardinal had reflected upon that a great deal from his hospital bed. As he recovered steadily from the wound placed on him by the very hands he had shaped – any question regarding that would paint a grimace on his usually affable, round features – he had watched as every meaningless day succeeded, one after the other, after Bezu Fache and his characteristic deadpan tone had informed him, plainly, that Silas was dead.

 _He would have taken it with consequence,_ he thought. Once, he had found his Silas smiling like a knowing child as he stared at the spread feathers of a bird's corpse out in the gardens of the Cathedral. But what did he see...? Aringarosa wished now having been naïve enough to ask, to lean in and imagine the whole world around them disappeared for a few seconds so he could beg for that secret.

All that crypticness had made him think sometimes..., that maybe, all of those deliciously unreal moments were no coincidence. Perhaps they answered to the design of a third mind, an absolute mind, powerful enough to spill a thousand pens on the pitch-black sky and write with their ink in a language so concentrated, so far out of this world, that only a holy being could find them and understand.

Or maybe not. Maybe Silas had been indeed too strange to live, destined to never really find a place in this cruel and random universe.

Perhaps that was why reality..., _this_ reality, so different to the one he had lived in, was adjusting so quickly to his absence. Life went on without that angel – shallow, yes, but brighter than ever. Deep inside, the Bishop's consciousness had always insisted there would be no happy ending to their tale; and he had never flinched a finger to change that.

Ah, well.

His own lack of remorse was astounding. Having always been a man of low pulse, that should be unsurprising – but he had taken the notice of Silas' death less as a blow and more as a signal of change, the signal that he was definitely now an empty shell permanently trapped in that crude, cynical mess of a world. The moments they had shared and cherished together were barely an echo cemented in his mind.

There was nothing else. Emptiness and some – few – problems to sleep, that was all.

Aringarosa had considering grieving for one night, seasoning with caffeine his efforts to stay awake and think about him. But was it worth it? His Angel could have changed much, but he had not; he was dead, and the cruellest poetical justice, after all those plans he had wholeheartedly believed in about bringing an opportunity for change to this godforsaken world, was administered in that nobody – including the one who had orchestrated it all – would shed a tear for him.

Aringarosa had once thought his own taste for Silas' pain was cruel. It turned out that the lack of feeling was crueler.

How dramatic.

What an odd chapter had begun, when the angel irrupted in his life. When he still was a Bishop, he'd thought he had seen everything, but as if a divine force was determined to prove him wrong, there it was: the sight of that hulk of a man collapsing on the floor of his Cathedral, desperate for aid, pale as the Pyrinean snow and gashed with red all over as though he'd barely managed a desperate run through the mountains..., it would be enough to raise the most impassible man's eyebrow, wouldn't it?

By them, the Bishop had already been a seasoned man. He'd waved away the fervent religious beliefs in favour of actual, tangible things, like money – what really pulled the strings of destiny and mankind, after all, for any God had yet to bail him from arrest. But that wounded man..., he had been in all honesty, and he still was, the most similar thing in the world to the image of that Faith that Aringarosa had given up on. His gestures the most dizzyingly fluid the Bishop had ever seen, his pale eyes damp with gratitude, every laceration on his deathly skin whispering a fascinating story about how exactly the fallen angel wound up sleeping for forty-eight hours straight in his bed.

Perhaps in an impulse to play God himself, the personal God to this stray devout, he had given him a name.

And so, Silas had been reborn.

And the creature he was reborn in was his possession, his creation.

When one looked at him with fondness and not fear, it filled his heart to the brim with will to serve,

and _oh_ , was it beautiful.

Silas' attention was insatiable. And for the Bishop, the feeling of being regarded as such a figure, as a person with real knowledge over universal secrets, became intoxicating. To be admired was one thing. But to be offered a soul wholeheartedly, a soul ready to take any shape given the right words...

The pain had been ever-present in Silas' childhood, but in their connection, it had gained a new meaning. Aringarosa told himself his labour was therapeutical, letting his devout lamb claim his tortuous past back. But deep down, he knew that was a lie; he remembered his own childhood, his strange taste to break his favourite objects and pretend it had been an accident, just to see if he could get away with it.

Sometimes, the morphine brought back a particularly vivid dream – or perhaps it was a memory, as vivid as Silas had claimed to live them...

-

The one time when he had sat, relaxed, on the edge of his bed, noticing only how the pale moonlight played on the sheets, tracing both the silhouette of the bedpost and its shadow, reminding him of an abstract form of art; experimenting without really knowing where it wanted to end.

And the silence, the silence would have been delightful, if it was only not broken by that rhythmic, agitated breath.

“F-Father,” the sweet, dragged voice seemed hoarse after that intense session, a sign that the words wanted to be contained. Silas was facing away, only a canvas of recent wounds in between two muscular, mortuary white shoulders, “I feel weak, Father. I can't... I can't anymore...”

A tug on his robes made him look down. A hand, drenched in sweat, pulled all the way behind the Saint's martyred back, demanding an attention he pretended not to give. But instead of cracking against his back again, the whip fell flaccid across the pale shoulder like vine; the Cardinal suddenly wished a closer look, and he set his hands at the sides of his devout Silas, partly mentally racing through excuses to keep the expiation going, partly just curious to see how much longer he could stretch it.

As Silas meekly turned around, following the gentle command of his hands, he gave a long look to that body, to those hard muscles, the flat abdomen, so pale all those blood vessels were plainly visible underneath... and  only one thought lingered in Aringarosa's mind.

He was not an unlucky man.

And yet... _, and yet..._

“You are not weak, Silas. Your body must get accustomed to the ways of purification,” he had said, putting the kind of empathic expression into his tone which would assure his devotee that it was _not_ some worn excuse, “You must learn to remove the doubt... doubt and fear are the roots of cowardice, of betrayal, as you very well know.”

Silas believed. He wanted and needed to believe. But he retained no control over his own breathing, and the exhausted, quick nod of his icy-white face was ironically enough to melt a bit of the Bishop's coldness.

And Aringarosa sighed. Sighed at the sight of those marked cheekbones, that defined jaw – those pale eyes, the roughened features, they honestly had to be the antithesis of some humanistic Renaissance paintings his Cathedral held – and, as he grasped the whip with one hand in defeat..., he also cupped Silas' cheek with the other, tracing the scarred lips with a thumb, wishing to slip in that mouth and give him more reasons to punish the sin out of that sacred body.

“But I suppose... you still must still get accustomed. We can stop for today.”

And he supported Silas up with his forearm, lifting him further and standing up himself.

His Bishop had to resist the temptation to trace a hand through the fresh wounds of that abnormally white skin, instead wondering how that man was so big and yet light as a feather. Perhaps that was a factor, and he had been reflecting on this for quite some time, which inclined him to believe that, despite everything, he _was_ a toy placed on his hands by destiny...

It could not be any other way. He was so otherworldly, so delicate.

“Thank you, Father,” came the rough answer, as Silas meekly gave into the contact. The angel arose, his tall figure staggering against him for a moment, laying his chin on Aringarosa's shoulder. Time stood still, and he exhaled a sigh which sent a shiver through the Bishop's spine at the strange, improvised embrace.

_Pleasure exhumed the pain, but sometimes the line between both blurred and he just couldn't tell them apart._

It was Aringarosa who broke the contact by giving into the temptation, sinking his short fingernails on the bruised back, strongly – perhaps too strongly – but enough, enough to feel a tremble underneath, to tear a rough and dry moan from that throat, perhaps not only of pain.

When Silas pulled back, he replied to the quizzical look on his eyes with a smile. And he knew, as soon as the smile was puzzledly reflected in Silas' thin, scarred lips, that the momentary distrust had been erased; that angel was starting to ignore everything which questioned the belief he hung on, the belief that Aringarosa was a pious and loving man who only wanted what was best for him.

It was beautiful.

“Very good. Go to your quarters then, and leave me alone to my own expiation.” He had felt almost guilty about the lie, but the prospect of more wine and something better than divine forgiveness could ever be..., it was too tempting.

He had never trusted something that made him feel out of control, but perhaps, this angel of his was an exception to all rules, as only angels could be.

-

He only thing Silas had ever loved was a lie, Aringarosa supposed.

But the only thing he had ever lover was hurting Silas, and that was gone.

Fair game.

He did miss all those times where he'd told him to close his eyes and dream of salvation, of that purging fire. The instances he had adored the sunlit fragments of metal sinking into that skin, seeing crimson trails dripping down that pale thigh and thinking that, after all, God existed – and He had gone insane.

Perhaps someday they would meet in the deserts of Hell, and he could ask Silas if he remembered what it meant to be alive. Was his devotion blind, or had he suffered in silence? And if he had, could he tell every last detail about it? Perhaps then it would be Aringarosa who drank his words in reverie.

He knew, if he had given in and allowed his protege to cross the most extreme boundary..., if he had complied to his heart's desire and done everything those pale eyes had pleaded for..., perhaps they could have made each other _happy_. A simple, banal, comfortable happiness.

They would have swam on that rumoured marvellous feeling, deceitfully convinced they could trust someone else with their lives.

Then again, the Cardinal would never have given up those summer nights for happiness. Was it worth it, after all?

No one would ever answer that question correctly.

Ah, well.

No one would ever know what it was to have the angel at his feet, drinking everything he said with a fascination which made him loath himself every day.

No one would ever know what it was to look at that broken saint pleading under the moonlight, so eager to sail that poisoned stream with him.

No one would know because, frankly, no one cared.

No one would know because he was dead.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I am going to self-flagellate a bit for just writing that, thanks.


End file.
